Honeybee: Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper

By Cate Hennessey

Honeybee: Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper, by C. Marina Marchese. Black Dog and Leventhal: 2009. 256 pages.

My first memory of honey comes from my father. Saturday mornings, he liked to spoon the golden sweet onto buttered toast and then fold the toast in half. Before bringing it to his mouth, he murmured, “The food of the gods!”

I agreed with him and ate my toast exactly the same way. I still do.

The other constant about honey in my life has been that it comes from the grocery store in a squeezable plastic container – sometimes bear-shaped, sometimes vase-shaped.  It’s found in the aisle with the peanut butter and jelly, and then, once purchased, sits in the pantry with baking supplies.

C. Marina Marchese’s Honeybee: Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper has made me whisk that honey from the pantry and examine it – as well as the honeybees that produced it — in a whole new light.

At first blush, the book may seem like it belongs on the city-person-turned-agricultural-pioneer bookshelf. Certainly, Marchese chronicles the first year of her journey from bee neophyte to beekeeper extraordinaire. (She eventually leaves her “real world” job as a designer to begin her own bee business, Red Bee.)

But the book’s center is not Marchese at all. Rather, it focuses on the creatures that provide her livelihood. As a result, the pages delve into the intricacies of the honeybee — its anatomy, sociology, lifecycle, and vital role in agriculture. In short, the honeybees make fruit and vegetable production possible; without the honeybee, our food supply would collapse.

If the importance of the honeybee to agriculture isn’t impressive enough, Marchese details the role of honey, beeswax, and the honeybee in history, covering countries as diverse as Russia, Israel, Greece, China, and India. (My favorite tidbit is that Leo Tolstoy, the Russian author, was a beekeeper.)

And if economics, culture, and history don’t convince readers to revere the honeybee, add medicine to the list. Marchese dedicates a full chapter to apitherapy, the use of bees and bee products to promote health and healing. Sustainable and all natural, apitherapy provides an environmentally responsible way to “maintain health and harmony within the body.” This had led Marchese to develop a line of all-natural personal care products, and she even includes in the book a recipe for homemade lip balm using beeswax, olive oil, and essential oils.

Honeybee concludes with the complex, delightful culinary experience of honey. Marchese likens honey to wine – both depend on terroir for unique flavors and composition. As a result, honey tastes, looks, smells, and feels different depending on where it’s produced. Also like wine, honey is available in varietals – Apple Blossom honey, for example, or Blueberry or Lemon. Looking for more exotic honeys? Wenchi comes from a tree in Ethiopia; Ulmo from a shrub in Chile.

Wondering about that grocery store honey and why it all tastes the same? That’s because it combines honey from many sources (my last bottle said US, Turkey, and China) and is also heated to prevent crystallization. According to Marchese, this heating process removes many of the best qualities of honey – an argument similar to proponents of unpasteurized dairy products. The glory of honey, she reveals, is that it doesn’t need to be heated; it’s merely a market convenience to preserve appearance.

For readers who want to think outside the honeybear and embark on an artisanal honey-tasting adventure, Marchese provides Appendixes of honey-related terms in four languages; she also presents a list of 75 varietals of honey, complete with tasting notes and pairings. The amount of time, love, and research that went into the appendix is apparent, and my mouth watered by its end.

After I finished Honeybee, I ordered some of Marchese’s honey; I wanted to see and taste for myself the difference of artisanal honey. Within a week the first jar of wildflower honey with honeycomb was gone. Now I’m dipping into Goldenrod honey, a varietal darker, thicker, duskier in taste than wildflower honey. The glass jar lives on the kitchen counter next to the coffeepot; the dark amber honey glows even in the wan winter light. I haven’t thought once of relegating the jar to the pantry.

Once my supply of Red Bee gets low, I’m off to scour Chester County for local honey. Check back in late spring to find out more about my honey expedition – and where you can get your own local honey.